Moon, Show Yourself

The Highest Construction Project in the World, 5000 Meters Above Sea Level

What is this strange thing? It's a prototype radio antenna, one of 66 that are to be built across the Llano de Chajnantor plateau in Chile. Once completed, "new galaxies are likely to be discovered at the rate of one every three minutes..." That's an amazing thing. It should be finished by 2012, and offer images 10 times sharper than those from the Hubble. (from an 8/25 CNN.com Space and Science piece)

Fire Rainbow Spotted this summer over Idaho

This is pretty rare, but what's going on here is the following: sunlight is being refracted through ice crystals in cirrus clouds several kilometers above ground. This particular "circumhorizontal arc" lasted for almost an hour, and it was seen over northern Idaho in June. If the hexagonal crystals are aligned just right, and the sun happens to be in the right location in the sky, this is what you get, the entire cloud lights up in a spectrum.
For more info, see the web, plug in some of these keywords, or look at The Physics Teacher, Vol. 44, Sept. 2006, p. 391.

Algebra and Trigonometry, 11th Edition, for M027

Greetings IU undergraduates enrolled in M027! Hey, what's your problem, man?! The problem is that for one reason or another, the bookstores don't have a stock of Earl Swokowski's "Algebra and Trigonometry with Analytic Geometry", the 11th edition. What's the solution? Get thee to a Swain Hall Library, where there are 3 copies of it on Reserve (thanks to the Math Department). Rumor is the bookstores will have them by next week...in the meantime, wander over to your nearby mathematics library. Since the loan length on these books is fairly short, you may even want to make use of an ancient contraption over here called a photocopier.